All articles about Agile success

The Night Sky and the Tea Koan

As a coach, there are a number of stories that I usually talk about to my new teams to help them understand what my job is all about.

One I like to use with teams that think they already know agile is one I call “the night sky” which I based on my own personal experience. It goes something like this; when I was a kid growing up in the suburbs, I frequently played games outside with my friends at night. Sometimes we would look up at the sky and try to identify those constellations we knew. Most often we found the big and little dipper, but our limited knowledge (and limited view) allowed for little else. Nevertheless, to me this was the night sky.

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Software Development is Communication

The longer I stay in the software development business the more I am convinced of certain things. One thing that has hit home recently is this very interesting fact – on the whole, those in charge of software delivery are fundamentally ignorant of how software is made. I have written previously about how software development is a creative process, but what amazes me is that the people who staff and manage software development fail to see how much communication is necessary to software development.

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Apke's Law

Most of my 7+ years of Agile coaching and scrum mastering has been working with existing waterfall organizations and helping them become more agile. During this period I have seen a wide range of companies and a wide range of successful adoption, but I have noticed one thing that is constant. This was brought home recently as I reflect on my most recent agile presentation/discussion given at Geekdom in San Antonio last week.

In this Agile open forum the majority of the questions dealt with transitioning from waterfall to agile. This is where I first publicly broached Apke’s law which states:

Your transition to agile will only go as far as the highest ranking manager who understands and supports it.

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Want a Quick Agile Win? Try Office Hours

When you are an Agile Coach you sometimes must resign yourself to the fact that it will usually take team members awhile to get it and victories can be few and far between. One thing that I can recommend for a quick win and something that has worked well for me on multiple occasions (when it could be implemented) is something that I called office hours. I can only assume that I am not the one who invented this, but it is something that I “discovered” independently to solve the issue of resources being pulled into unproductive meetings when I needed them to be on task for our stories.

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Looking for Agile Success – All You Need is Love

Like any professional should I spend a great deal of my time attending user’s groups, reading professional articles, speaking with leaders in my field, etc in an attempt to find ways to do my job better. This morning I stumbled upon a couple of interesting articles, The Unintended Consequences Of A Leader’s Lack Of Trust (whose link has gone inactive) and Employees leave managers, not companies. While not exactly writing about the love, these got me to thinking about love and its place fostering Agility.

It is the nature of my job to bond tightly with the teams that I work with and also to have to leave these teams frequently, as they achieve a high level of self organization, to pursue opportunities to help other teams. I am currently faced with one of these moments and the feeling, as always, is bittersweet. I am excited about my new opportunity but will genuinely miss the teams I have worked with over the past few months.

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Agile = Antifragile?

I am currently reading the book Antifragile: Things that Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I loved two of his other books, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable and Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets so I thought that I would give this one a go.

His central thesis is that there are systems that are not only robust, able to withstand randomness and chaos, but there are those that actually thrive on such events. He calls these “antifragile” as opposed to fragile systems.

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